Here’s my thoughts on the EcoTrain question of the week: What Action Do You Think Needs to be Taken to Combat Climate Change?
Ever since I was very young my father was most concerned with climate change and what he termed, “Runaway Greenhouse Effect.” His talk of how close we were to so many tipping points that if triggered, may cause the climate to spin so far out of control that the earths oceans boil away into space, made a big impression on me.
It seems like to this day, there is a wide range of opinions on how dangerous climate change is and the facts concerning the issue are difficult to understand. Without a clear understanding and widely available facts about how quickly things are changing, I think it is more difficult to take proper action. Encouraging the publication of clearly understandable facts and charts would be helpful. Stressing near term effects instead of relating problems that might occur a long time in the future would be of benefit. It is hard enough to predict the weather a week in the future and I think long range projections on climate change are not very beneficial.
With that said, I do think it is of benefit to think about what general trends are happening in the society and economy and what actions we might to do to help encourage beneficial activities. One of the biggest changes that appears to be happening is a switch from a material based economy to one that is more cooperative and digital in nature. For most of human history our survival has depended on controlling physical resources. Those people or institutions that controlled the access to the best resources always managed to do the best. I think this is changing.
The material based economy has caused many problems, mostly because the external costs of extracting a resource is often not factored in when profits are taken. If the fossil fuel companies had to pay all the external costs associated with the production of energy through the burning of coal or gas, pump prices would go way up and nobody would like that. Encouraging alternate renewable less polluting forms of energy and discouraging subsidies to fossil fuel would be really good.
Photo by Anthony Shkraba from Pexels
The new digital based economy does not require physically commuting to work. It does not play by the same set of rules like buy low and sell high. It does not require massive amounts of capital to control the extraction and distribution of physical resources. Potentially, it could give many people a great deal more wealth instead of concentrating the wealth in the hands of fewer individuals like we have seen in the past.
So far it does not seem like many people really understand the shape of the new digital economy. Regulations seem largely designed to keep on doing, “business as usual.” Unfortunately, business as usual is not going to help out the climate change issue any, in fact estimates are that we may soon run out of resources with business as usual. I think we need to do what we can to encourage and promote the new digital economy.
As the price of Hive keeps going up it feels a lot like this trend of opportunity to build wealth through digital means can work out. With clean power generation, the digital economy can provide a lot of beneficial value without resource extraction and gateway keeping. It could allow more people to have the kind of wealth that would be beneficial to combat climate change. (Both the really poor and the extremely wealthy may live lifestyles that are harmful.)
So doing our best to promote the digital economy would be one of the best actions, but it feels like most of are already doing that as far as my readers go.